This is how it appears when the state takes your children.
Fjord is a film about the moment when a family’s children are removed by state authorities. The mood is restrained, clinical, measured, and by the book. No violence is shown on screen. Voices are seldom raised. Everything unfolds in the distant, impersonal cadence of bureaucratic procedure.
Yet the movie, which earned the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is utterly infuriating, a relentlessly fierce, ferocious, gut-punch of a work. It serves as a haunting meditation on the consequences of unchecked state power, especially when it claims to act for one’s own good.
A great portion of the film’s impact comes from its straightforward depiction of what happens when an individual, or a family, falls under state scrutiny. There is no narration, no sermonizing, no grand speech at the end. Instead, writer-director Cristian Mungiu, a Romanian filmmaker whose sympathies clearly lie with the family, simply shows us, without flinching, what it feels like to lose rights and freedoms to a bureaucracy that answers to no power or authority but its own rules.
As the film opens, the Gheorghiu family—a mother (Renate Reinsve), a father (Sebastian Stan), and their five children—relocates from Romania to a quiet Norwegian town. Soon enough, school authorities notice bruises on the children. We the audience know the bruises did not come from the parents, but the children, who do not speak Norwegian, give inconsistent accounts. After being brought in for police questioning, the father confesses to occasionally spanking or lightly smacking his children on the bottom as a form of correction. In order to walk free, he’s compelled to sign a statement that twists his words, making his admission of spanking sound far more sinister and violent.
He is also a conservative Christian, which creates social friction: he has played Christian music, without singing along, on a school piano, something frowned upon in a state that strictly curbs proselytizing. School officials worry that he makes his children pray and read the Bible; the kids aren’t allowed to play video games or watch YouTube. One of his children spoke out against homosexuality during a gender-education session. Teachers and administrators suspect he may be indoctrinating his children.
Thus the school authorities alert Norway’s powerful Child Protection service. The children, including a breastfeeding infant, are removed from their parents’ custody and placed in three separate foster homes. At first, visitation is denied, and the parents are kept in the dark about the whereabouts of the children.
Then the couple goes to court, initially facing a civil case, with a criminal child-abuse case looming in the background. As the legal process unfolds, they are repeatedly told that resisting the outcome will only worsen it. The state demands compliance and an admission of wrongdoing. But if they admit to abusing their kids, doesn’t that provide the state with grounds to declare them unfit to parent? Won’t it make the criminal case more likely to end badly for them? As their own, largely sympathetic attorney explains to the parents, “Frankly, unless you convince them that you understand and regret it, the risk of prison is substantial.”
Later, at the trial, a representative from Child Protection calmly states that there is no reason to think the children would be better off with their biological parents, highlighting the family’s limitations on video games, internet access, and YouTube. In their view, the state knows what’s best for the youngsters; the culturally backward, religiously conservative parents do not. It’s not accidental that one figure, a conservative Romanian political personality who has come to publicize the case, likens the power of Child Protection to the force of the Soviet state.
A crucial aspect of Fjord’s effectiveness is its restraint. You don’t have to be a traditionalist, a conservative, or a family-values evangelical to recognize that what befalls the Gheorghiu family is simply wrong. They are railroaded by an overbearing bureaucratic state that distorts reality in order to cast them as villains, with the end goal of separating the children from their parents and from each other. Who, in this story, are the real child abusers?
The tale is fictional, but not hypothetical. Fjord draws from the true case of the Bodnariu family, conservative Romanian immigrants whose five children were taken from them by the Norwegian state in the 2010s on similarly flimsy grounds. The family eventually left Norway. After viewing Fjord, it’s easy to understand why.
